Defined broadly, a visionary, is one who can envision the future. For some groups this can involve the supernatural
The visionary state is achieved via meditation, drugs, lucid dreams, daydreams, or art. One example is Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th century artist/visionary and Catholic saint. Other visionaries in religion are St Bernadette and Joseph Smith (said to have had a vision of and communed with the Blessed Virgin, and the Angel Moroni respectively).
Read more about Visionary: Extended Meanings, In Art
Famous quotes containing the word visionary:
“Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.”
—Salman Rushdie (b. 1947)
“The American doctrinaire is the converse of the American demagogue, and, in this way, is scarcely less injurious to the public. The first deals in poetry, the last in cant. He is as much a visionary on one side, as the extreme theoretical democrat is a visionary on the other.”
—James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851)
“And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love,”
—Hart Crane (1899–1932)